[tlhIngan Hol] Is {Sal} a verb of movement ?

[Will Martin]

I agree with you that the term “verb of motion” has no more fundamental usefulness than “locative verb”. Both almost describe what is going on, but fail to clarify the point.

To be honest, I don’t remember significance put on the term “verbs of motion”, though I’m sure I overused it. Certainly, there’s nothing in TKD that uses the term, and if I’ve been using it, it’s just something that came out in an attempt to convey some meaning, and thinking on it now, I think whatever it conveyed is incomplete. I don’t remember intending to create an intentional classification. If I did, I was foolish to think I accomplished much.

[Pause. Try to remember decades ago.] Yep. I overused it and I was foolish to do so.

Certainly, the difficult part of understanding {ghoS} and its ilk has more to do with understanding what kind of objects it takes, since it is unlike English to have a verb that has this sense of intentionality wrapped up in it. I suspect that it has a similar character to the difference between {-pu’} and {-ta’}. {jaH} means “go” with no reference to the direction or manner or intent of the going, while {ghoS} implies following a specific course or path. You plan {ghoS} and as you {ghoS} you are executing the plan.

The plan is revealed by the verb's object, which is a noun associated with the path or course. You are correct that it’s the location of the object that is significant. The weird part is that we have this grammatical marker for location, {-Daq} and we don’t use it on the object of a verb. So, the suffix {-Daq} has a weird relationship with this particular group of verbs.

It’s one of the beautifully strange features of Klingon. You can’t casually approach these verbs without thinking it through and recognizing that something different is happening here. This ain’t English, or French, or Finnish, or Mandarin. This is alien.

We have a verb {ghoS} for moving along a path, {vegh} for moving through a doorway/tunnel/opening, and probably a few others that I’m too rusty to bring to mind. The closest English equivalent is “orbit”, since the direct object of “orbit” has a prepositional relationship to the subject and verb. When you orbit something, you go around it. You don’t go it. While you can say you orbit around it, the preposition “around” is redundant and superfluous.

In Klingon, it’s more extreme than that. {-Daq} is not merely optional. It changes the meaning. The object of {ghoS} is the path, but a grammatically marked locative is more locally where the subject happens to be while following a path that is not marked by the locative, like sailing along a river in a boat. The locative is the boat. The object is the river.

I can imagine a Klingon learning the English verb “peel”, and he’s shown how to peel a banana and an orange, and then he picks up a pistachio and starts talking about peeling pistachios, and people have to explain that you don’t peel a pistachio. You can peel off a band-aid. You can peel off a helmet. You can peel off a sweater. You can peel off body armor. But you can’t peel a pistachio.

Basically, you don’t understand a verb until you know what works as its object and what doesn’t.

That’s the problem with TKD. It doesn’t typically tell us a lot about what does or does not work as an object for the verbs. We make the best guesses we can, and then maybe someday Okrand gives us canon that corrects whatever misunderstandings we get from failed guesses.

charghwI’ ‘utlh



> On Feb 11, 2019, at 4:46 PM, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:
> 
> On 2/11/2019 4:36 PM, Will Martin wrote:
>> I think the real issue here is that most verbs take some kind of object, and on a case-by-case basis, in order to fully understand each verb, you have to understand what kind of object it takes. While I like the idea of the term “locative         verb”, I think that it might tempt people to oversimplify the relationship between verbs and objects by classifying one type of verb that uses a location for an object as different from all other verbs that use something other than a location as an object.
> I'm not going to pretend that I have carefully read your entire email. Instead, I'll respond to this first bit. I'm not declaring a new world order in which all worship the locative/non-locative divide. I'm just saying that locative verb is more accurate than verb of motion.
> 
> We started saying verb of motion when your interview with Okrand was published and we were dazzled by the implications. The thing is, we didn't notice that this concept had been with us all along, in that passage of TKD that I quoted before. The interview focused on verbs that had to do with motion, and indeed these will probably be the majority of such verbs, and we started calling them verbs of motion. Okrand didn't use the phrase, we did. Okrand didn't link this type of verb to motion, we did.
> 
> Then we start confusing ourselves, trying to figure out which verbs involve motion, when what's really going on is that we need to look for verbs that involve location. That's what TKD tells us. It doesn't use the term locative verb any more than Okrand used the term verb of motion, but it's a nicely descriptive term.
> 
> That's all. You're speaking in absolutes; I'm just acknowledging a useful term.
> 
> 
> 
>> So, I think “locative verb” is a good idea to open one’s mind to the sometimes complex and arbitrary relationship between a verb and its objects, but I’m not sure it classifies enough verbs into one group to fully function as a useful classifier. I also think that it might group together verbs that don’t really work exactly the same way, and we might become tempted to think that they do when they don’t.
> That's exactly what I think verb of motion does.
> 
> 
> -- 
> SuStel
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